ON THE OUTDOORS.

Rugged lifestyle fit for top of the world

The quarterly Bush plane carrying supplies probably won't bring the Christmas gifts and mail to Heimo Korth, his wife Edna and their teen daughters Rhonda and Krin until March.

Of course, they pay much more attention to the season's weather than the season's calendar. The Korths, who reside in a cabin in the foothills of the Brooks Range in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, probably live in an area more remote than that of any other American family.

They are the only people for 250 square miles. The closest major city, Fairbanks, is 300 miles away. They are the only year-round residents in the 19 1/2-million-acre refuge, which the Bush administration would like to open to oil drilling.

In the 21st Century, when the world seems to be shrinking because of sophisticated satellite communications, the Internet, television and ever faster airplanes, Korth, who is in his mid-50s, and his clan live an extraordinary life.

Just as generations ago Eskimos and settlers lived by the rhythms of the land, the Korths trap, hunt and haul their own water to survive. The story of their existence, and how Korth adapted from his upbringing in Appleton, Wis., is told in a new book, "The Final Frontiersman: Heimo Korth and His Family Alone in Alaska's Arctic Wilderness."

The author is James Campbell, Korth's cousin, who lives near Madison, Wis., and who dropped in on Korth for seven months over 2 1/2 years in the early 2000s. Campbell reacquainted himself with the relative who went north in 1974.

The rarity and extreme nature of Korth's lifestyle speaks to the romance in all of us--the American spirit of adventure, of fending for ourselves--that so many of us dream about but either don't have the courage or wherewithal to undertake. Undoubtedly, a spark of this type of fantasy is retained among those of us who devote time to the outdoors, hunting, fishing, camping or hiking in the wilderness.

When we venture out, we sometimes wonder what it would be like to stay out, to forgo the conveniences of modern bathrooms, TV and other electronics in favor of a back-to-the-land existence. Could we do it? Even for a little while? Could we choose the purity and challenge of the wild over the pleasures of society?

Korth did.

And he has Campbell sold.

"I would move there," Campbell said in a recent interview before a lecture at the Adventurers Club in Chicago. "If I could convince my wife. That's our legacy in America. We're full of romance. Whether we want to do it on our own or just read about it, it enlivens us. We still want to try it."

Make no mistake, such a backwoods lifestyle is more labor-intensive than romantic, more difficult than pleasurable, more notable for deprivation than plenty.

Campbell, 43, knew his older cousin from family picnics in Wisconsin. When Korth moved, he remembers swearing that one day he would do the same thing.

"I thought I was going to be a mountain man too," Campbell said.

Instead he became a writer. When he first suggested recording Korth's story, Campbell was surprised to get a "not interested" note back. Five years later, Korth invited him.

Korth relented, Campbell surmised, because he is the last trapper left in the refuge, grandfathered into his place by legislation that is good only as long as his children wish to remain.

Campbell likes to call Korth's neighborhood "one of the coldest places on the planet." He found that out firsthand by staying in a 10-by-10-foot wall tent heated by a wood stove when the temperature dropped to minus-51.

To earn about $4,000 a year, Korth ships the furs he traps out by Bush plane while rotating among three cabins, the largest being 16 by 12 feet. He also hunts for moose or caribou.

"In the Arctic, meat doesn't come in plastic," Campbell said.

In "The Final Frontiersman," Bill Schneider, curator of oral history at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, offered perspective on Korth's lifestyle.

"Wilderness is both the source of, and a repository of, our national myths about who we really are as a people," Schneider said. "Yet the people who are left out there, living the myth, are more out of touch with American life and values than ever before. Ironically, we always have held in higher esteem those who make forays into the wilderness than those who live in it. We're creating an environment for ecotourism, but we're eliminating a culture dedicated to living on, and working with, the land."

One would hope that the real thing would be more revered than imitations, but we can see that isn't always so just by stopping into a souvenir shop in a tourist hotbed.

Heimo Korth is the genuine article, however, and worthy of our admiration.